Sony's Mark Cerny Talks PS4

4K resolutions, avoiding bottlenecks and why backwards compatibility is out of the window.

TSA Staff, 5 years ago, 12 comments.

In a brand new interview Sony’s Mark Cerny, a man currently charged with the design of the PlayStation 4 hardware and functionality, talks about the system, backwards compatibility and running that 4K resolution for the user interface.

The interview’s in Japanese, but translations exist, so whilst it’s tricky to 100% verify the information as exact, it’s likely enough that the core facts are intact.

The 'see the future' trailer for PS4.

First up, why did Sony decide to drop backwards compatibility? Apparently doing so was deemed a “necessary evil”, and was done “to make sure devs will be happy going forward”.

We assume this means that the costs saved from not having BC mean devs get the extra, super-fast RAM, and so on.

And whilst the PS4 doesn’t include the Cell chip, Sony learnt from the development of Cell to make the PS4 so powerful.

4K resolution? Games are “focusing on 1080p”, Cerny says, but it’s entirely possible to render the user interface (on top of the game, as you can now with the PS button) in 4K.

That said, it’s likely that most games won’t do this to save resources – running the UI alone at 4K takes 10 GB/s.

Cerny also talks about the custom chipset (and confirms the PS4 will use ARM’s TrustZone) and reiterates that the console will allow users to play games whilst they’re downloading – something that was mentioned at the reveal but nice to hear again.

He also hints that we should be seeing near-100% take-up on Vita Remote Play for PS4 games, saying that there’s “almost no overhead” and “without pain whatsoever, you will be able to Remote Play a PS4 game.” That’s encouraging, as is the brief mention of off-TV play…

Cerny also states that the operating system will run on BSD, a flavour of Unix.

For our latest thoughts on PS4 and what it means for next gen, click here.

3rd parties will always be weighing up potential lost sales, although with the small install base of the Vita it’s not like they’re selling multi-million copies of their games on the Vita to miss out on.

I read the interview on a different site, the bit where it says ” running the UI alone at 4K takes 10 GB/s” had straight after it “and 10 GB/s for the second screen”. Will the PS4 support duel screens?

The translation wasn’t the best, there were a few parts you needed to read over to get the meaning.
I cannot see duel display being used by many as most don’t have two HD TVs that they can put together, unless you can use a smaller screen like a monitor. That could be useful.

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